Sunshine

“You know about my dad?” I said.

They all snorted. Pat sounded like the horn on something like a semi or a furniture van. Ooooongk. “Does the sun rise in the morning?” said Jesse.

With or without the help of the guys from Antares? “Then probably you know that my mom raised me to be, er, not my father’s daughter.”

“Yeah,” said Pat. “Made us real interested, if you want to know.”

I stared at him. “You had better not be telling me you have been hanging around the coffeehouse for fifteen years on the off chance that you could catch me—turning blue.”

It wouldn’t be turning blue, of course. Unlike demon blood, magic handling was welcomed by both government and corporate bureaucracy in its employees—sort of. What they wanted was nice cooperative biddable magic handling. Somewhere between a third cousin who could do card tricks and a sorcerer. The problem is that as the magic handling rises on the prepotency scale, the magic handler sinks off the other end of the biddableness scale. But there probably had been biddable Blaises. And no one had ever proved my dad was a sorcerer. I didn’t think.

“We hang out at the coffeehouse because we’re all addicted to your cinnamon rolls, Sunshine, and your lethal dessert specials, especially the ones with no redeeming social value,” said Pat. “You didn’t see us half so often before Charlie built the bakery. But your dad didn’t hurt as an excuse on our expense accounts.”

Another pause. I didn’t say anything.

“And your mom seemed kind of…well, extreme about it, you know?”

And another pause. I seemed to be missing something they wanted me to catch on to. But I was so tired.

“And the coffeehouse is a good place to keep an eye on a lot of people. Gat Donnor.” Poor old Gat. He was one of our hype heads. Sometimes when he got the mixture wrong—or right—he turned into a skinny orange eight-foot lizard (including tail) that would tell you your fortune, if you asked. The locals were used to him but tourists had been known to go off in the screaming ab-dabs if they came across him. SOF was interested because a slightly-above-the-odds number of the fortunes he told were accurate.

I brought myself back to the present. Sitting in a SOF office with a blue demon SOF and a few friends.

“I suppose you know your Mrs. Bialosky is a Were?”

I did laugh then. “Everyone believes she is, but no one knows were-what. No—don’t tell me. It would spoil it. Besides—Mrs. Bialosky is one of the good guys. I don’t care what her blood has in it.” It is a violation of your personal rights to have blood taken by your doctor examined for anything but the disease or condition you signed a release form about before the lab tech got near you with the needle, but accidents happen. One of the other ways you could guess a Were or a demon is by their paranoia about doctors. Fortunately the lab coats perfected artificial human blood fifty years ago—or nearly perfected it: you need about one in ten of the real thing—so donating blood isn’t so big a deal any more, and the nasty-minded don’t necessarily get any ideas looking at blood donor lists about who isn’t on them. Human magic handling doesn’t pass through transfusions; demon blood won’t make you a demon, and weak part-demon might not show at all, but strong part- or full-demon makes a fullblood human very sick, even if the blood type is right. And being a Were transfuses beautifully, every time.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Jesse. “So, you grew up being your mom’s daughter, with no higher ambitions than the best cinnamon rolls in the country. Did you know about your dad?”

I hesitated, but not very long. “More or less. I knew he was a magic handler, and I knew he was a member of one of the important magic-handling families. Or I found that out once I was in school and some of the magic-handler kids mentioned the Blaises. I was using my mom’s maiden name by the time I went to school, before she married Charlie. I knew that my dad being a magic handler was something to do with why my mom left him, and…at the time that was enough for me.” I thought about the “business associates” my mom hadn’t liked. That was what she’d always called them. “Business associates.” It sounded a lot like “pond slime.” Or “sorcerer.” As I got a little older I realized that people like my mother mean “pond slime” when they say “sorcerer.” Lunatic toxic kali pond slime.

“I felt like my mother’s daughter, you know? And after we cleared off I never saw my dad again.” I’d never said this to anyone before: “My mom was so determined to have nothing whatever to do with my dad’s family that I wanted to be as much like her as possible, didn’t I? She was all I had left.” They all nodded. “So you didn’t know anything about what your own heritage might be?”